The Math of Quality (Or Why the Gatekeeper System is Failing) | The Passive Voice | Writers, Writing, Self-Publishing, Disruptive Innovation and the Universe:
"Opening up the flood of books (quality or not) has changed the profit model, pushing the profitability of individual books down so far that its impacted the overall strategy and forced publishers to reduce advances and now they’re considering eliminating print runs for most new authors. I can only assume that this is being considered because the overhead for a single book from an author without a sales history has decreased so much that they can’t even pay an advance, so rather than eliminate the advance (which is one of the benefits of the gatekeeper system) they’ve eliminated expensive overhead, which is in this case, is a print run (and by extension – the awful returns system.)"
Interesting look at the radically changing book marketplace.
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